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ice--reappeared to me. You remember the Nichols thing--boloed in the dark between my town and Himamaylan. His _muchacho_ had jumped into the ditch. Afterward he got out and ran back the whole way, fifteen miles, to my place. I started down there. My idea was to pick up Miller as I passed, then Dent a little further down, find the body, and perhaps indications for White of the constabulary, to whom I had sent a messenger and who could not reach the place till morning. Well, Miller refused to go. He had caught hold of some rumor of the happening; he was barricaded in his hut and was sitting on his bed, a big Colt's revolver across his knees. He would not go, he said it plainly. 'No, seh; Ah cain't take chances; Ah cain't affawd it.' He said this without much fire, almost tranquilly, exactly as he had, you remember, at the time of our shipwreck. It was not so amusing now, however. Here, on land, amid this swarming, mysterious hostility, at this crisis, it seemed a shocking betrayal of the solidarity that bound all us white men. A red rage took possession of me. I stood there above him and poured out vituperation for five good minutes. I found the most extraordinary epithets; I lowered my voice and pierced him with venomous thrusts. He took it all. He remained seated on his bed, his revolver across his knees, looking straight at some spot on the floor; whenever I'd become particularly effective he'd merely look harder at the spot, as if for him it contained something of higher significance--a command, a rule, a precept--I don't know what, and then he'd say, 'No, Ah cain't; Ah cain't affawd it.' "I burst out of there, a-roar like a bombshell. I rode down to Dent; we rode down to the place and did--what there was to be done. Miller I never wanted to see again. "But I did. Some three weeks later a carrier came to me with a note--a penciled scrawl upon a torn piece of paper. It read: "'I think I am dying. Can you come see me? 'MILLER.' "I went down right away. He was dead. He had died there, alone, in his filthy little hut, in that God-forsaken pueblo, ten miles from the nearest white man, ten thousand miles from his home. "I'll always remember our coming in. It was night. It had been raining for thirty-six hours, and as we stepped into the unlighted hut, my _muchacho_ and I, right away the floor grew sticky and slimy with the mud on our feet, and as we groped about blindly, we seemed ankle-deep in something greasy an
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